Drawn: The Painted Tower

Share this:

Big Fish Games have just released a rather charming adventure game called Drawn: The Painted Tower. The story-book illustration art style is perfect for the concept, which involves various magical paintings which must be fixed, navigated, and interacted-with as you negotiate your way up the tower to save the last person who can paint such things: a young girl. Annoyingly, the demo comes wrapped up in Big Fish Games game launcher, but nevertheless the hour-limited taster is definitely enough to get a sense of whether or not you like it, which I rather do. It has some of the frustrations of “er wot” that come with point-and-click adventures, but it’s not been too obtuse with its puzzles so far.

As far as I can tell, the client only downloads the game. It doesn’t start automatically and doesn’t annoy. I didn’t even have to register, so you can probably enter a fake email address.

The game seems lovely, and I might buy it, but the demo in reality is only 15-20 minutes long. Which is kind of disappointing for a demo with a 1 hour play time limit.
And I can’t really tell how much longer the game will be and if it will ever be challenging and what the challenges will be. So far it was mainly finding things you could click on. It was always clear how to advance once you found the clickable item.

So yeah. If this had a 1 hour demo, that was actually 1 hour long, I might be more interested. So far I can’t tell if I’d like the game.

The client doesn’t run on start-up, and seems just to function as a hub to launch any of their games from. Uses next to no resources too.

The game is… growing a little tiresome, and it’s puzzles are stagnating a little. The hints system is great in theory but doesn’t alter based on what you’re doing. So when you’ve done two out of three parts of a puzzle, but are stuck on the last, it insists on giving you hints for the first parts too, and you have to wait for the hint meter to recharge before getting another one.

Finished earlier. At four hours total play time, felt far too short – but could be because I was enjoying it rather a lot. Tricky one though – really easy to pick apart, and if you’re being deeply analytical, not a lot to praise other than the lovely innocence to it all. But that somehow wins out. Denby’s thumb is raised.